Waukesha County

Laurel Walker | In My Opinion

Ramirezes form a portrait of U.S. Latinos

When "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams" producers looked for faces to illustrate their upcoming weeklong series on Latinos in the United States, they found one portrait in a well-known Waukesha family.

Waukesha County Circuit Judge Ralph Ramirez, his mother, Margaret, and his oldest daughter, Alicia, were interviewed for hours this month, with film shot in their homes, in Ramirez's court and in the Fitchburg store where Alicia recently started her new management job after college.

The series is called "We the People." Given the news show's time limits, footage will inevitably wind up on the cutting room floor. But producer Maria Alcon said in an e-mail that Monday's segment, set to air at 5:30 p.m. on WTMJ-TV (Channel 4), will use the Ramirez family to demonstrate the Hispanic population's growth and roots established by generations finding opportunity in places you wouldn't necessarily expect, like Wisconsin.

The judge said the interviews focused especially on differences in opportunities between his mother's generation and his daughter's.

"It was interesting," he said. "For the first time in my life I put makeup on."

Margaret Ramirez, who at 76 still works on call a couple of days a week as a psychiatric technician at the Waukesha County Mental Health Center, came to Wisconsin as a migrant laborer at 12.

She was born in Texas - her mother was from Mexico, her father Texas - but her parents brought the family to do Wisconsin field work in the early 1940s. She spent much of her earliest teen years stooped over Kenosha County fields picking tomatoes. After three years of that, her parents settled their 10 children in Racine, where her brother got a foundry job, then her father.

She met her husband, born of Mexican immigrants in Oklahoma, when he coached Hispanic baseball teams playing in Racine. They settled in Waukesha and eventually raised five children.

"I wanted my kids to be better educated than I was," she said. "I thought, 'They're never going to work out in the fields like I did,' and they never did."

Her children became a judge, psychologist, police officer, union organizer and business employee.

Onetime prosecutor Ralph Ramirez became the first Hispanic circuit court judge elected in Waukesha County without benefit of a gubernatorial appointment - though not the first Latino judge.

While many Hispanics have more recently arrived, Ralph Ramirez grew up in a well-established, involved community that began arriving in Waukesha in 1919.

While his mother's early years were in a segregated Texas school, he graduated in 1977 from a high school where he sat next to the daughter of a Supreme Court justice and children of surgeons and business leaders. Waukesha has long had Hispanics elected to the School Board and as aldermen.

Now look out for the next generation. Alicia Ramirez, the oldest of three siblings, had a job lined up in management at a new Target store two months before she graduated in December from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Younger brother Joe Ramirez will attend UW next year, and middle daughter Maria Ramirez, also at UW, is studying abroad in Spain after a summer's study on scholarship in Egypt two years ago.

For these Americans with Hispanic roots, it is indeed a land of opportunity.